A Political Economy of Modernism

Analyzes the complex unity of modernist culture, paying special attention to artistic, intellectual, and social institutions that embody value.

This book examines the complex unity of modernist culture by focusing on literature and the arts; intellectual disciplines of post-classical economics; and institutional structures of corporate capitalism and the lower middle-class. This book is for graduates, scholars, and researchers working in Modernism.In A Political Economy of Modernism, Ronald Schleifer examines the political economy of what he calls 'the culture of modernism' by focusing on literature and the arts; intellectual disciplines of post-classical economics; and institutional structures of corporate capitalism and the lower middle-class. In its wide ranging study focused on modernist writers (Dreiser, Hardy, Joyce, Stevens, Woolf, Wells, Wharton, Yeats), modernist artists (Cézanne, Picasso, Stravinsky, Schoenberg), economists (Jevons, Marshall, Veblen), and philosophers (Benjamin, Jakobson, Russell), this book presents an institutional history of cultural modernism in relation to the intellectual history of Enlightenment ethos and the social history of the second Industrial Revolution. It articulates a new method of analysis of the early twentieth century - configuration and modeling - that reveals close connections among its arts, understandings, and social organizations.